T.E. Lawrence

🟠 Selective Outrage Is Not Leadership 🟠 Sorcha Eastwood has decided that the biggest threat to the existence of Northern Ireland is the DUP. Not the intelligence assessment that dissident republicans may have had access to firearms on the Garvaghy Road. Not the possibility that those weapons could have been used against police officers. Not the organised blockade that rendered a court-upheld determination unenforceable. The DUP. In her post she accuses the party of “unleashing months of genuine fear and anxiety” by “reopening” a parading dispute and of letting an “unelected nobody” lead political unionism. She then brands the DUP the biggest threat to Northern Ireland and “absolute fools.” What is absent is any equivalent condemnation of the security threat that the Chief Constable placed before the Secretary of State. The High Court heard that it was “almost certain” dissidents had attended the protest and “possible” they had accessed firearms in the area. It was “possible” those firearms would be used to attack police if officers attempted to clear the road. That assessment was central to the decision that followed. Yet in Eastwood’s telling, the problem begins and ends with Unionist politicians and an activist she dislikes. This is not balance. It is selective focus. A public representative can criticise the DUP’s internal handling of the fallout. That is legitimate politics. What is harder to defend is the decision to aim the strongest language at one side of the community while remaining silent on the armed threat that formed part of the official justification for setting aside a lawful determination. The people of Northern Ireland are entitled to expect elected representatives to address the full picture. When intelligence suggests the possibility of gun attacks on police, that fact belongs in any serious discussion of what made the situation dangerous. Reducing the entire episode to a complaint about Unionist leadership and an “unelected nobody” does not meet that standard. Fear and anxiety were real for many people during those weeks. They were not created solely by the decision of Portadown District to seek to complete a traditional route that had been lawfully determined. They were also created by the willingness of some to occupy a road in defiance of that determination and by the security assessment that serious violence, including the possible use of firearms, could follow any attempt to enforce it. If the test of responsible politics is the willingness to confront threats to public safety and to the rule of law, then the silence on the dissident firearms assessment is conspicuous. Naming the DUP as the greatest threat to Northern Ireland while declining to name the armed threat referenced in court is a political choice. It should be recognised as one. Northern Ireland does not need more selective condemnation. It needs consistent standards. The same seriousness applied to Unionist failings should be applied to the factors that made a court-upheld right unenforceable. Anything less is incomplete. #Drumcree #GarvaghyRoad #SelectiveOutrage #RuleOfLaw #PSNI #NorthernIreland #PUL